SHIELD Streaming Explained

The streaming capabilities from PC to SHIELD with high-end graphical experiences like Bethesda Softworks’ Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Gearbox Software’s Borderlands 2 have been demonstrated in the past. Will Park at NVIDIA explains what this cross-platform technology means for gamers in this exclusive interview.

What will a gamer need to be able to stream from their PC to SHIELD?
All you would need is a GTX 650 or higher graphics card in your PC because you need that GeForce experience and you’d bring your SHIELD, which is powered by Tegra 4, and it has all the horsepower to be able to talk to the computer and bring any game like Skyrim or Borderlands 2 and stream it straight to the 5-inch SHIELD touch screen.

In addition to a PC monitor, will this also stream to HDTVs?
Yes. So we have it running on a PC over with full resolution and maxed-out graphics settings and we’re streaming that to SHIELD and it’s getting the same exact benefits. On the flip side if you want to go one step further, you can actually HDMI it out to a big screen TV and take advantage of the bigger resolution and obviously the bigger size.

In the past, you've actually shown games running on a 4K TV, so how powerful are these games?
We've shown a Tegra 4 reference platform streaming to 4K so that wasn’t SHIELD, but it’s the same processor family that’s powering SHIELD and they are powerful enough to drive not only the 4K display which is 4,000 pixels across, but to drive the local displays at the same time, so you’re driving both displays.

Can explain how PC gamers with Steam can play with SHIELD?
Whatever games you have on your PC could be standalone or they could be inside your Steam library or even Origin. What we do is we use the GeForce experience on the PC side and the SHIELD app on SHIELD and they talk to each other and let each other know what games you have. They read your library and know if you have Battlefield 3, Need for Speed and Borderlands 2. Whatever game you pick, if that’s inside Steam, it will fire up Steam on your PC and stream it straight to the SHIELD. Likewise for Origin.

What does Tegra 4 SHIELD add to mobile games?
We've shown a lot of the Android games optimized for Tegra 4, which means the developers add enhancements like Physics with our PhysX engine and powerful effects like biometric smoke and fog and higher textures. We had approximately 20 games on display at CES, GDC and E3 that featured things like real-time lighting, and specular lighting for those dynamic shadows and cool, rich, dense atmospheres. Games like Blood Sword, Freestyle RC, The Conduit THD, Real Boxing and ARMA Tactics.